Sunday, 13 May 2012

Ashleigh and Pudsey; So. It has come to this.

Heaven knows, I try not to let anything shock me. I am not going to pretend that the outcome of Britain's Got Talent shocked me or knocked me off stride. The news that, faced with people who could sing dance and the lord knows what else, the great British public voted for an agile dog and his owner did not me surprise me in the slightest. I'm not actually sure what it would take before the outcome of text voting in the UK mainland would make me take a deep breath and say "Well, that, I did not expect." The restoration of chattel slavery and the reintroduction of sumptuary taxes, perhaps. The replacement of the monarchy by an animated waxwork of Henry Hawley Crippen, voiced by Cherie Blair. No, wait, they already did that with 10 Downing Street, and it wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened there in my life time.

Still, it was weird enough to get me thinking, and most of what it got me thinking was "Is THIS what it's all about? Are all of these reality shows with viewer voting just meant to make us give up entirely on the notion of democracy?". Because you've got to wonder, don't you? There goes the British public voting for some random woman and a dog that does what she tells it to do. That's what voting gets you, is it? And then it struck me; some pretty face with a couple of sound bites, backed up by a tame poodle what hogs the camera? Didn't the UK just do this in 2010? Does reality game show land even NEED to point out the futility of voting?